This Week In Fiction: Tessa Hadley

You titled your story in this week’s issue—in which a fifteen-year-old girl accepts a ride from three older boys and is permanently affected by what ensues—“An Abduction.” The word “abduction” usually has very negative connotations, but you see what happens to your heroine, Jane, in slightly more ambiguous terms, don’t you? Why this title?

I knew I was using a word that suggested something much more terrible than anything that happens in my story of teen-age initiation. And so I make it clear in my first sentence that Jane will get back safely: there’s going to be no violent denouement, no dazzle of publicity. There’s a mismatch, deliberately, between the horror the title suggests and the almost-nothing that happens. What interests me in Jane’s story isn’t the outward drama so much as her interior adventure, in which she’s “taken out of herself,” as we say: the frame of her world is wrenched—out of the blue, and within minutes—into a quite new shape, through a chance encounter, and through her openness to that chance. In the real-life cases where the abducted person returns home safely, what fascinates us is the idea of what he or she does with the experience afterward, in the imagination. Where can this new and alien material be stored within the old framework, where there was never any category for it? I think it’s so poignant that momentous things happen in people’s daily lives, happen perhaps without outward trace, but, inwardly, the imagination goes to work. Jane’s whole character will grow around this event, though she never tells anyone about it. That’s heroic in a quiet way, I think.

The story is set in Surrey, in the nineteen-sixties, at what seems to be a time of cultural change. It’s also a time of change for Jane, who is poised on the narrow ledge between childhood and adulthood, between her sister’s doll tea parties and the older boys’ alcohol-and-drug-fuelled escapades. Do you see the events of the story as a kind of launching pad for Jane?

They ought to be—but somehow they’re not, and that’s not even really anyone’s fault. As a first experience of sexual passion, Jane’s isn’t a bad one. It’s almost dreamlike: the beautiful boy, who isn’t gross or unkind with her. And she’s ready to be initiated. It could have been a launching pad: perhaps Jane could have become one of those pretty posh girls hanging around the edge of pop culture in the sixties. She thinks, when she talks to her mother, that she might never go home again. But then, as soon as she feels shut out, finding Daniel and Fiona together, she’s defeated; she retracts into her upbringing and her mother’s training clicks into place. (She says, “I’d like to go home now, please,” in her mother’s voice.) So instead of being a launching pad it becomes a kind of stopping point. She never gets back inside this story—it’s “paused” in her perpetually, like a film paused on a DVD player. She’s stuck in the no-place between the beginning of her passionate life and its fulfillment. As she says to her counsellor, she feels from that point on as if she were shut out from real life.

Why is it that Jane can’t “assimilate” the events of that night? What is it that she can’t or doesn’t want to accept?

Her imaginative, passionate life has been set going, and then it’s thwarted abruptly (partly by her own proud act). It isn’t shame that thwarts her. One of the things I liked about my character as she came to me was that she isn’t actually squeamish or guilty. (Though she does hate the sight of her wide feet.) She’s a real sensualist, wide open to experience. Yet somehow when she’s prevented from progressing in her first experience of love, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go: she can’t make any kind of sense of the abduction in her ordinary life; she can’t bring it into relationship with anything at home. She has no worldly narrative to fall back on. (She doesn’t read novels—they help!) She’s a kind of blank, really, partly because of her upbringing, and partly because of her character, which is a very interesting one—deeply impressionable and receptive, but not forceful, not able to carve its own way. She’s stuck in a kind of silence. Imagine trying to find words for what’s happened, to explain it to the Allsop household. (And that was partly why I couldn’t tell the story simply through Jane’s own perspective. I needed omniscience, I needed room to move, to know better than she did, know better than any of them did.) It’s as if—like some grand courtesan or tragic heroine—she’d put everything into her first love affair, she’d staked everything on this one chance, and lost. Yet nobody knows it; nobody notices. It’s like a nineteenth-century novel, really. She tells the counsellor eventually (but only half tells), as a woman in an older novel might have told her priest in the confessional.

Do you mean to link the changes in Jane’s life to the larger social shifts of the sixties?

I do, yes. Of course every generation comes up with its own, new forms of innocence and experience. But there was something particularly acute in that juxtaposition in England in the sixties, between an old, sheltered, obedient, ordered, “respectable” middle-class way of life (does anyone worry about being respectable now?), with all its comedy and horrors, and the new hedonistic youth sub-culture (which had its horrors, too). Those extreme juxtapositions are so exciting to write about: it’s like a perfect experiment, testing one version of the truth against another, incompatible version, and seeing what explosions, what deformations result.

You talk about Daniel’s not remembering Jane or what happened with her as a kind of loss for him. Too much happiness has desensitized him to these little moments of grace or beauty. Do you think that remembering that night (even if she didn’t assimilate it) had a positive effect on Jane?

Thinking about the effect on Jane was what I wanted to do when I wrote the story. That was part of why I needed the framing omniscient narrative, which is almost fairy-tale-like, or perhaps like a crime report. I didn’t only want to capture the subjective experience of the happenings; I wanted this subjective experience to add up to something, to reveal something surprising. By every ordinary reckoning, Daniel’s adult life is pretty good, and Jane’s is unfulfilled. She’s never believed that her life is quite “real.” This is a bad outcome from the abduction, no doubt about it. It’s sad. (But stuff happens—it could have been worse.) At the end of the story, I try to set up an alternative reckoning by which we can value Jane’s peculiar, private experience—in a way that she can’t value it herself (just as she can’t see how she’s beautiful, in that moment when the boys first catch sight of her). This alternative reckoning has nothing to do with happiness. It’s obvious that Daniel is often happy, and that Jane mostly isn’t. But in the last paragraphs I’m attempting to make a case for a value—a spiritual value, perhaps—in the sheer power of Jane’s remembering. The abduction doesn’t have consequences in her life, except maybe negative ones. But she gets to “keep” what happened, storing it and guarding it and keeping faith with it. In some sense, the mystery of her past experience is resolved, through her consciousness, through the sheer scale of her reaction to it. Daniel, on the other hand, hasn’t held onto it. He has been desensitized to the power of single things, single moments. The story is partly a kind of ode to shyness. To the power of the hidden experiences that people store up and quietly dwell on and don’t preen themselves over. It’s obvious why a writer would be interested in this remembering, this conservation of past experience, kept secretly alive inside the imagination.

Your characters—or their parents, at least—are all relatively privileged, living in elegant houses, attending boarding schools and Oxford. Do you think this story would have worked in any other class setting?

It would be possible to transpose the basic outline to a different setting—but then it would be a different story, too. The story is embodied in the textures of a particular setting and a particular time, inside a particular class culture. These textures aren’t padding or decoration. The elements of their talk, the car, what they wear and eat, Nigel’s mother’s angular armchairs—all these are also the shape of what it’s possible for them to do, what might possibly happen to them. All these form the unrepeatable single moment, which the story tries to do justice to. In another context, everything would have felt different, would have worked out differently. That’s why experience goes on being interesting to write about: literature never has to repeat itself.

Is part of the distance between Jane and the boys a political one, too—her Conservative upbringing, their collegiate liberalism?

There’s a powerful politics at work dividing them, but it has much more to do with gender than with a political liberalism narrowly conceived. The real gulf is between their masculine ambition and confidence and her anxious-to-please, yielding femininity. I can imagine Jane’s brother, Robin, easily at one of these parties a couple of years after the story ends. I can imagine Nigel as a Tory M.P. The Allsops and Nigel’s parents could have dinner together. In some ways, the boys’ radicalism is fairly superficial, politically (though not culturally). They belong to the same privileged class as Jane does.

Is this an environment—upper-class Surrey in the sixties—that you know from your own childhood?

No. I grew up in a city in the west of England, and my parents’ class and lifestyle were rather different to the Allsops’. My father was a schoolteacher and a jazz musician and then a shopkeeper; my mother was a dressmaker. They were (and are) arty socialists.

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